How Donald Trump’s withdrawal from landmark trade deal became a setback for democracy in Vietnam

Obama had billed the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a chance for the US to
write the rules of trade in the world’s fastest-growing region – while also
curtailing China’s influence

It was one of US President Donald Trump’s very first acts: to pull out of
the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a sweeping 12-nation trade agreement that had
been the centrepiece of President Barack Obama’s strategic “rebalance” toward
Asia. Trump had charged that such deals hurt American manufacturing, and on
January 23, 2017, he signed the withdrawal order in the Oval Office.

“A great thing for the American worker, what we just did,” Trump said.

With that, he set in motion a political and economic storm that is still
reverberating in Vietnam. Freed from conditions imposed by the Obama
administration to join the trade pact, Vietnam’s Communist government has
scrapped plans to allow independent trade unions and unleashed its most severe
clampdown on dissent in decades. Authorities have arrested scores of social
activists, bloggers and democracy advocates, sentencing many to jail terms of
10 to 20 years.

Vietnam offers an example of the little-noticed fallout from some of Trump’s
earliest decisions. The Trans-Pacific treaty, known as the TPP, quickly faded
from American headlines as Trump launched high-stakes trade battles with China,
Europe, Mexico and Canada. But the abrupt policy change has had far-reaching
ripple effects, according to diplomats and activists.

“As soon as America withdrew from the TPP, you saw a radical change in the
way the Vietnamese
government treated workers, labour activists and unions,” said labour activist
Do Thi Minh Hanh, 33, speaking in a cafe in Ho Chi Minh City. “A lot of people
have been harassed, followed, imprisoned and threatened.”

Trump’s policy change wasn’t the only factor in the Vietnamese crackdown –
hardliners had become dominant in the Communist Party and were concerned about
a rise in social activism and protests. Nor is he solely responsible for the
fate of the TPP.

Obama had failed to persuade a sceptical Congress and public of the deal’s
merits before leaving office, with the result that his signature Asian foreign
policy initiative was widely maligned. Indeed, such was the prevailing mood
that candidate Hillary Clinton signalled her intent to pull out of an agreement
she had once lauded as the “gold standard” of trade deals.

Asked about the TPP decision and crackdown in Vietnam, a spokesman for the
National Security Council, Garrett Marquis, said trade treaties weren’t
necessarily effective in achieving democratic reform. He pointed to China’s
accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001, saying it “proved beyond all
doubt that increasing international trade doesn’t always liberalise
authoritarian single-party states. In fact, it may delay liberalisation by
making the ruling party stronger.”

The pros and cons of the trade pact are debatable. But some things are more
certain. The United States’ decision to construct and then exit from the TPP
struck an enormous blow to its credibility in Asia, one that China was not shy
about exploiting. The decision also exacted a real human cost in Vietnam,
activists say.

As the TPP was being negotiated, a budding movement of Vietnamese activists
used social media to spread ideas about workers’ rights, transparency,
accountability and even democracy. The US government had engineered the trade
agreement to also secure promises from Vietnam’s leadership that it would
permit independent trade unions, strengthen environmental controls and allow a
free and open internet. When the TPP was scrapped, that dynamic was thrown into
reverse.

Minh Hanh has seen fellow labour activists arrested and given long jail
sentences. She has faced constant harassment, including being attacked by
masked men hurling rocks and explosives when she was staying at her father’s
house.

Another activist, environmentalist Le Dinh Luong, was charged with
subversion and sentenced to 20 years in jail. He has not been allowed contact
with his wife, who fears his fragile health means he will die in prison.

“The TPP could have been some wind in the sails of Vietnamese activists,
trade unionists and environmentalists,” said Brad Adams, executive director of
the Asia division at Human Rights Watch. “Pulling out of the TPP has been a big
setback.”

Obama had billed the TPP as a chance for the United States to write the
rules of trade in the world’s fastest-growing region and to raise labour and
environmental standards so US companies would not be undercut. The deal was
also a thinly disguised attempt to contain China’s rise by forming a regional,
rules-based order that excluded Beijing.

Liberalisers in Vietnam’s Communist Party saw the TPP as the incentive the
government needed to bring about change, with its offer of greater access to
one of Vietnam’s biggest export markets: the United States.

“The TPP is the driving force for Reforms 2.0. The business environment,
anti-corruption, labour reforms,” said Tran Viet Thai, deputy general director
of the Institute for Foreign Strategic Studies at the Diplomatic Academy of
Vietnam, a foreign ministry think tank.

Vietnam pledged to not only allow independent trade unions but also outlaw
child labour and give a greater chance to private firms to compete against the
Communist-run state sector. Citizens were promised a “free and open
internet”.

In February 2016, the United States and 11 other countries signed the
treaty. It still needed to be ratified domestically in those nations. But for
the first time since the Vietnam war, the United States had real leverage to
force the Communist Party to give greater political freedom to the people.

Then, the Trump administration withdrew.

“It pulled the rug out from under the reformers,” said Ted Osius, then US
ambassador to Vietnam.

During TPP negotiations, Osius had constantly emphasised the need to get the
trade pact ratified by Congress, and he would bring letters from members of
Congress to the Vietnamese government underscoring the attention they paid to
human rights. Donald Trump’s strategy was never about alienating the world – it
was always about containing China

“It was a very, very powerful message,” said Osius, a career diplomat
appointed ambassador by Obama. “It didn’t mean they threw open all the prison
doors, but they did consider American views when they made decisions. I don’t
think that’s the case since we pulled out of TPP.”

But in Vietnam, other forces were at work. Protests had erupted in the
spring of 2016 after a toxic spill caused the country’s worst environmental
disaster, with marine life washing up dead along a huge swathe of shoreline.
The spill came from a plant operated by a Taiwanese company, but the anger was
directed at the Vietnamese government for its slow response, lack of
transparency and corruption. It was the largest outpouring of anger in four
decades of Communist Party rule.

Within Vietnam’s ruling Politburo, hardline conservatives had gained the
upper hand during a leadership transition in January 2016, while Obama was
still in the White House. They were not about to tolerate an uprising.

The first hint of a crackdown came even before Trump won the presidential
race, with the October 2016 detention of the blogger known as Mother Mushroom.
But it wasn’t until the summer of 2017 that the arrests of activists started
coming thick and fast.

Mother Mushroom, whose real name is Nguyen Ngoc Nhu Quynh, had been arrested
in the past, but this time was different, with a 10-year sentence handed down
in June 2017 for “conducting propaganda against the socialist state”. She was
one of at least 29 Vietnamese activists arrested in 2017 for their writings and
advocacy on behalf of human rights, the environment and democracy, according to
Amnesty International.

One month later, on the evening of July 24, 2017, environmental activist
Luong was on his way home when a dozen plain clothes security officers stopped
him, beat him and took him away, his wife said. Luong is a successful business
executive turned community organiser and blogger.

“He wants to help others, the weak and the poor, to combat injustice,” his
wife, Nguyen Thi Quy, 53, said in an interview here. The couple’s son and
daughter-in-law were beaten when they asked police about his whereabouts, she
said.

Luong, 52, who suffers from gout, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for
“carrying out activities aimed at overthrowing the people’s
administration”.

Nguyen Van Dai, a lawyer, founded the Brotherhood for Democracy in 2013 with
several activists, and toured the country teaching others how to defend their
rights.

On April 5, after a trial with five other leaders of the group, Dai was
sentenced to 15 years in prison. Dai and one of his colleagues have since been
sent into exile in Germany – partly on health grounds and partly thanks to
international pressure, he said.

If the US government had stayed in the TPP, “Vietnam would have had to make
many commitments about improving human rights, about improving the situation
for workers,” Dai said in an interview at his modest, two-room home outside
Frankfurt. “It would have been a chance to change my country.”

Vietnam still intends to join a version of the TPP that will move forward
without the United States. But that deal excludes many of the tough steps that
Vietnam had committed to, including on workers’ rights.

Suspicion of China runs high in Vietnam, not least because the two countries
fiercely contest islands in the South China Sea. Whoever is in the White House,
Hanoi’s leaders will continue to look to the United States to balance Beijing’s
influence.

In late July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Southeast Asia touting
the administration’s alternative to the TPP, an “Indo-Pacific Economic Vision,”
promising greater economic engagement based on the principles of “freedom and
openness,” and led by American companies.

Meanwhile in Vietnam, US Embassy spokesman Pope Thrower said the US
government has maintained its “long-standing commitment to work with official
and non-government partners to advance labour rights in Vietnam”. But Minh
Hanh, the labour activist, sees things a bit differently.

She is grateful for the US support that helped free her halfway through a
seven-year jail sentence in 2014 but now feels more alone.

“The fact that the United States pays less attention to trade unions makes
my task as an activist a little harder,” she said. “But we activists will never
pull back, never give up fighting, with or without American support.”